Millionaire Boy Racers asked viewers to take sides

TV review: Millionaire Boy Racers pitched the ‘Gulfies’ against Knightsbridge residents. But whose side were we supposed to take?

It felt like Millionaire Boy Racers (C4) was one of those documentaries where you were supposed to take sides. In the red corner were the revved-up petrolheads roaring their supercar engines at full throttle; in the blue corner, you had riled-up residents enraged that the quiet of their posh streets was being destroyed. It was Top Gear vs Top Tories, a real Harry Hill fight! fight! fight! in the making.

However, this snapshot of summer London life never caught fire because film-maker Matt Rudge didn’t bring the two sides of his story together. One minute, we were slipstreaming with ludicrously rich young Arab lads, such as Adam and Rashed, who thought nothing of shelling out £250,000 on a Lamborghini; the next, we were sharing the gripes of Knightsbridge residents, with Harrods for a corner shop, who didn’t care for what the ‘Gulfies’ were doing to their neighbourhood.

This was an entirely charm-free zone where both sides were full to the brim with a sense of entitlement fuelled by lashings of cash. Obviously it would be a nightmare to have mega-expensive car beasts tearing up your street at all hours but the suggestion that the residents should actually try to talk to the drivers involved was greeted with blank astonishment. The suspicion sneaked in that they were getting what they deserved.

The oddest moment came when one of the boy racers, Abdul, explained why all the Knightsbridge streets suddenly cleared of supercars at the end of the summer. The owners all flew back, with their cars, to their homes in assorted Gulf States for the holy month of Ramadan. They would fast so ‘they could feel how the poor people feel when they are hungry’.

And later on, he explained the idea of Ramadan was to ‘encourage the rich people to do more for the poor people’. Selling one of the Lamborghinis would have been a start.